Ouch - Cringely Offers Stinging Indictment of IT "Profession"

Bob Cringely in his latest column entitled
"Reality
Check: What does Gartner really DO?" takes a good whack
at the hornet's nest that is the IT industry. Drawing a distinction between
"Real engineers" and "IT workers", Cringely argues
that the "lack of professionalism in IT" has spawned a symbiotic/parasitic
relationship between the advice givers and their customers.

Lumping Gartner and similar analysis
firms with IT consultants and vendors, Cringely makes a compelling case
that far from helping organizations make sound IT decisions, they in fact
provide cover for making stupid ones:

Into this knowledge
vacuum come the vendors, who want to sell stuff, and the consultants like
Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and the Yankee Group, who need IT managers to
feel uncertain about every decision except the decision to buy something,
anything. Then look at the number of "research reports" that
are commissioned by vendors. Uh-oh.

The five P's of IT are Pride, Prejudice, Politics, Price, and Performance,
with the last two being by far the least important. Consultants like Gartner
are very useful for minding the pride and politics, their real function
being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year.

So the saying "the best advice
is free" may just be true. If you ever need to make the case for hiring
"real" IT professionals into decision making positions as opposed
to listening blindly to what "the industry" says, just point
folks to this column. Then call me - I know people .

2 - Since I deal exclusively with small businesses, the impact of consultant reports is hard to predict. Most SMB's only care about seeing evidence of a similar solution having been put into production and the follow-on ROI and EVA analyses, and I like working with those. It's all about results, price and performance.

In a very few SMB's the person in charge of IT (who rarely has "IT" in his/her job title, and I've never found one at the C-level) reads publications like Computerworld, Infoweek, Wired, PC Magazine or Fast Company and makes IT decisions based on that. Those are often influenced by consultant whitepapers, which as we all know are sometimes less than accurate or completely forthright. In an even smaller segment they IT manager is actually aware of firms like Gartner and reads their reports.

I find the magazine-based IT management the most difficult to reason with. Countering the "but I read it in so-and-so" argument is frustrating when all you have is years in the field actually doing what the journalism majors are writing about. Coming up with credible sources that refute something that's been published is hard when all the common wisdom is so far off from reality, but it's all you can find since none of the people who have actually done it have been cited.

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